Lin Xiyuan and the Ming Recovery of the Four Dong1

A State Agent at Odds with the State 169

Chapter 6 A State Agent at Odds with the State: Lin Xiyuan and the Ming Recovery of the Four Dong1

Kathlene Baldanza

Introduction

In 1536, Lin Xiyuan (c.1480–1650), the recently-appointed magistrate of Qin- zhou in the far south of the Ming empire, climbed the city wall and surveyed his new home. Qinzhou was a port city in Guangdong province along the southeast coast of China, a mere day’s travel from the Vietnamese border.2 The location was deemed so undesirable by most of the Chinese elite that it was reserved as a post for poorly performing bureaucrats or for disgraced offi- cials. Lin had recently been demoted after a career full of ups and downs. De- scribing that day, Lin wrote in his gazetteer, “When I arrived here, I climbed the wall and looked out in every direction. I saw that the auspicious mist (wangqi)3 of Qin was all in the west. Nearby are the villages of Zhonghe, Yongle and Dao- hua, more distant are the counties of Guangxi and Jiaozhi [Đại Việt]. One must pass through Qinzhou to get to these places. It would not do to shut this door – I suggest we open it.”4 An area known as “the four dong (si dong),” lost to the Ming in 1427, lay due west of Qinzhou city. The four dong marked the begin- ning of Đại Việt territory. Lin quickly intuited that his hopes for promotion lay to the west and set out to repair the western wall and bridge of the city to en- courage increased interaction. Lin would complete several similar projects during his time in Qinzhou, but his biggest accomplishment was his role in impelling the Mạc government of Đại Việt to return the four dong to Ming rule.

* I would like to thank the editors, Christopher Moore, Peter Perdue, and Siyen Fei for their helpful comments on this article. 1 Originally presented at the Association of Asian Studies Meeting, Philadelphia, 2010. 2 Due to 20th century redistricting, Qinzhou is now located in Guangxi province. In the Ming, it was in Guangdong province. 3 This phrase is used to symbolize imperial good fortune. 4 Qinzhou Zhi (Shanghai: Shanghai gu ji shu dian ying yin, 1982), 7:7; also quoted in Du Shuhai, “Qinzhou Xibu de Difangshi yu Dudong zhi Minzu Xian Jiyi de Chuangzao” (The Creation of the Memory of the Ancestors of the Du and Dong People and Local History in Western Qinzhou), Minzu Yanjiu, 2 (2009): 73. Many of the Ming documents cited here are also used in Du Shuhai’s article.

In this essay, I assess the impact of one man, Lin Xiyuan, on shaping the in- ternational border. Lin Xiyuan brought his prodigious energy and will power to this outpost of the Ming state, extending its borders through an act of administrative imagination. In the case of the Ming’s conquest of the four dong, it was Lin who dreamed it, researched it, and made it so. Dismissed by his col- leagues as a meddler, Lin Xiyuan did not have recourse to Ming military power. Instead, he made use of other tools of conquest: assertion of historical claims, creation of maps, promotion of Chinese culture, and encouragement of eco- nomic ties. Yet despite the Ming’s acquisition of the four dong, the frontier would re- main difficult to manage and control. Like the career of Lin Xiyuan, Chinese imperial progress in the south was uneven, and true progress was hard to see. For urban elites like Lin, the map of the Ming empire seemed unambiguous, with divisions between states, provinces, counties and towns as clear as ink on paper. The closer one moved to the borderline that separated Đại Việt from China, however, the more the line receded. Where Lin carried with him from Nanjing clear-cut ideas of administrative units, ownership, and subjectivity to the state, such ideas held less weight in the borderlands. In Qinzhou, imperial projections met local realities and fell apart. The recovery of the four dong from the Mạc is the story of how a border was drawn and redrawn by state agents, transgressed by local residents, and appro- priated by later historians. It demonstrates that “China’s march toward the tropics”5 was not a linear process, but one marked by advances, retreats, and enduring resistance. In reality, this trade of land was an administrative coup, a paper change that had little local impact. The four dong were written into the Ming map of empire but remained outside the control of the state. This was due in part to the mobility of the inhabitants of the four dong region. Neither Chinese nor Vietnamese in terms of culture, language, or ethnicity, they moved freely between the two states, as did rebels and refugees. The Ming state may have claimed the area as its own, but it would have trouble ruling this territory, even a century later.

5 For the classic study on this topic, see Herold Wiens, China’s March towards the Tropics: a Discussion of the Southward Penetration of China’s Culture, Peoples, and Political Control in Relation to the Non-Han-Chinese Peoples of South China, and in the Perspective of Historical and Cultural Geography. (Office of Naval Research, US Navy, 1952) and for a re-visitation that puts more emphasis on the agency of indigenes, see John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univer- sity Asia Center, 2007), esp. 3–6.